Perhaps it is impossible to write an article about politics without evoking strong – and maybe quite emotional – thoughts and responses. One particular all-too-human reaction to a novel concept or idea about which we have a strong "gut feeling" (good or bad) is to construct logically-sounding reasons to justify our initial emotions. For this reason, I would like to ask readers who would like to comment on this article to sleep one night over their reply before they post it.

Politics is all about defining the legal environment that guides society. It is this framework that defines to a large extent what is illegal and what is not, what is profitable and what is not – hence what sort of economic activities will be pursued. Evidently, political decisions therefore have a major impact on how well societies manage their natural resources. Some would even claim that sustainability is exclusively a question of politics. While I personally would not subscribe to this idea, there have been a number of people who became professional politicians out of a strong inner desire to move their respective societies away from their suicidal paths. Across the globe, some quite prominent politicians invested a lot of personal energy into this – often to ultimately fail in resignation. One might think, for example, of the German politician Herbert Gruhl, originally a member of the conservative party, who, cancelling his membership due to irreconcilable differences on environmental issues, became one of the founders of the German Green Party. In 1992, the year before he died, he published a sequel to his 1975 best-seller (whose title would translate as "Plundered Planet"), which roughly would translate as: "Ascension to Nothingness – the Plundered Planet at its End". In the U.S., Jay Hanson seems to have played a similar role. Resignation clearly speaks out of the last lines of his article ‘requiem’:

A hundred thousand years from now – once the background radiation levels drop below lethality – a new Homo mutilus will crawl out of the caves to elect a leader. Although we have no idea what mutilus might look like, evolutionary theory can still tell us who will win the election. He will be the best liar running on a platform to end hunger by controlling nature.

How could it be otherwise? – Dieoff.org

Maybe both Gruhl and Hanson are right. My contention, however, is that they might have mistaken some of the (in particular, unspoken, implicit) rules of the political game for natural laws cast in stone.

When considering the role of politics, it is very important here not to get distracted by both widely-accepted-yet-never-questioned beliefs as well as overly seductive ideas. The first and most important observation about First World democracies is that there is a big and actually quite visible discrepancy between what politics claims to be and what it actually is. On the one hand, we believe that in democracies, all power comes from the people. Yet, there are numerous examples of political decisions (legislative or not) for which there very clearly never has been a mandate by the people. Taking Germany’s recent past as an example, one might for example think of the introduction of college fees, the introduction of a reduced VAT rate for hotel businesses, biometric passports, the attempt to replace paper ballot with electronic voting, new surveillance legislation and numerous other issues. In theory, what keeps our representative democracies running despite the problem that transgressions occasionally do occur is that if these became too serious, representatives would be punished in the next election – and as they know this, they will act with diligence. But does this actually work? Reality seems to teach us otherwise. At times the degree of ignorance with which feedback from the people is treated by their representatives is quite amazing, as was the case with a recent petition to the German parliament, which collected more signatures than any other (more than 134,000) – just to be completely ignored. Despite protest, the German parliament passed a law to introduce internet censorship infrastructure.

But does it have to be like this? Where do these problems come from? Can we do better – and if so, how? With questions like these, it is just as important to ask them as it is to exert great caution whenever someone claims to have found the ultimate solution (as some all too readily do). One key problem seems to be that the choice the voter has at the ballot box is to vote for one or another "universal ideology", i.e. for one particular system of belief that has its own special recipe to handle every single issue society has to deal with. Taking as an example a hypothetical German voter who sees an urgent need for politics taking environmental issues much more seriously, but considers, say, Green Party education politics as dangerously misguided. What should he do? Quite evidently, there is a problem – essentially one of massive loss of detailed information through the voting process. Also, it is fairly evident that such problems are indeed quite relevant as election outcomes do make a big difference to how specific issues get handled. The key question is: does it all have to be like this, or are the rules of the game open to be re-shaped by design? Quite likely so. As getting this done right appears tricky, we may have to resort to experimentation and close monitoring of how such experiments go.

One experiment that seems worth watching starts from a very basic question: What is the rationale for having representative democracies in the first place? Direct democracy, while it may sound appealing, faces two immediate problems: First, one of manageability. This may have been an issue in the past, but perhaps not anymore due to the high degree of communication connectivity available today, particularly in industrialized nations (which control the flows of most of the world’s non-renewable resources). With appropriate protocols and software design, secure, secret voting via phone or the web seems quite achievable. Second, there is the problem that not everyone is an expert on every issue. Hence, being able to delegate one’s vote to an expert of one’s choice seems quite a reasonable idea. But wouldn’t the most natural thing then be to choose these delegates as freely as one chooses, say, bakeries? If there are two or three bakeries in a village, no one is surprised if individual villagers buy different products from different bakeries – cakes from one, but rolls from another? Some people would certainly choose to bake their own cakes (and maybe also those for close relatives), and buy rolls and bread, but from different bakeries. If there is an issue with products from one bakery, one can (and usually will) readily switch to another. Wouldn’t it be great if the delegation of votes to experts were as simple and effortless as making choices where to get baked goods from? Can we imagine a "direct democracy with effortless delegation" where any one particular individual can make fine-grained choices such as to be represented by the Green Party, except on education politics, where one wants to be represented by Libertarians, and on agriculture, where one wants to be represented by the Permaculture Research Institute instead (not even a political party), but on seed legislation in particular one would choose Dr. Mollison as one’s representative, while on invasive species legislation, one would like to be represented by Dr. Flannery. Furthermore, on energy politics, one would like to be represented by one’s neighbour, who knows a lot about these things, but specifically on Uranium mining, one would like to cast one’s own vote directly (incidentally also representing one’s brother who delegated his vote on these issues). Quite likely, the Permaculture Research Institute would handle voting on agricultural issues in such a way that it re-delegated the votes delegated to it to its own expert, say Geoff Lawton. And no one would have to wait till the next election to change who one’s vote is delegated to on some specific issue.

This, in essence, is the idea behind the concept of "Liquid Democracy". There are a number of organizations who at present experiment with it for their internal decisions. In Germany a curious small new party, with an even more curious name and history, recently introduced "Liquid Democracy" internally: the "Pirates". An overview news article (very slightly flawed though) can be found here; the software that is used to implement this kind of voting is available under a free license and can be appropriated by any organization. This is at present a German project looking for translators (hint hint).

The "Liquid Democracy" approach is certainly an exciting – some would say outrageous – idea. It might (maybe after some tweaking) ultimately turn out to be the antidote to the most serious flaws of representative democracies – or maybe not. The only way to know is to do the experiment, it seems.

During my two week immersion into permaculture design, Bill Mollison was asked by a student, "How do we go about teaching permaculture to our children?” to which Bill replied something along the lines of, “I don’t believe we should be teaching Permaculture to children. They already have enough on their plates in terms of responsibilities and such, so we shouldn’t overburden them with yet another subject.”

True enough, if you take permaculture as the full 72-hour course that we adults tend towards. But I approach the idea that teaching children permaculture is vitally important to the sustainability of life itself and needs to be taught to youths so that by the time they are adults, permaculture is no longer a subject, but a way of life that is as natural as breathing.

But how would we go about uploading The Permaculture Designers Manual into the minds of our youths without overburdening their grey matter? Exactly the same way that farmers (1) are learning Permaculture – a bit at a time, with small bite sized chunks of drip fed information, with an emphasis on tacit learning. My son’s school has done their part in this by going for the low hanging fruit, the easy beginners’ steps of sustainability;

• Rainwater tanks all over the place, so many of them I lost count and the larger ones are connected to the subsurface irrigation system on the sports field. No swales though…
• Vegetable gardens for the children to learn about where food actually comes from and how to grow it. Other schools have taken this step even further with a Kitchen Garden Program
• Teaching about biodiversity; what it means, why it’s important, and how can we go about achieving it in our area? The NSW Government has provided fantastic teaching resources for this subject. They are covering subjects such as; the web of life, habitats and homes, ecosystems, vertebrates, invertebrates, food chains and webs and vertical layers of habitats.

Now these simple elements are not Permaculture as such, but they are a fantastic place to start and they will sow the seed within their generation for them to make the necessary changes for a sustainable planet.

I should probably point out that that my son is not at high school. He is only 7 and has already begun walking the path to sustainability. If he and his class mates can do it, then there is hope for us all.

Notes:

1. You would simply be amazed how well farmers are warming to elements of Permaculture. More on that next time.

Further Reading/Watching:

• Solving All the Problems of the World – in a Garden
• Scary school nightmares and de-schooling society

Resources:

• Eat Your Garden – Organic Gardening for Home and Schools
• Seed to Seed – Food Gardens in Schools

Preamble: Described as ‘the champagne of tea’, Sri Lankan tea is consumed the world over. Second only to Kenya in exports, Sri Lanka’s tea industry accounts for a full 15% of the nation’s GDP, generating about $700 million per year. Yet very little of this money is seen by the people actually producing it…. Tea plantation workers are trapped in low paid manual labour positions and live in miserable housing conditions, while people around the globe slurp on the fruit of their misery. Sarvodaya has its work cut out to try to assist, but they’re giving it a good try.

Sri Lankan tea plantation worker
All photographs © copyright Craig Mackintosh

Winding up into the south-central highlands of Sri Lanka was refreshing – taking us from temperatures pushing 40′C to a pleasant 24-ish. In contrast to the more arid south and north of the country, this hilly terrain, which hosts dozens of Sri Lanka’s world famous tea plantations, attracts significantly more precipitation and cooler temperatures.

Tea has been grown in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon, as named by the British colonialists) for more than 130 years. In the 1860s, after a rust fungus decimated the coffee plantations that previously majored there, tea quickly took over as the crop of choice. Although produced in several lowland regions in the south of the country as well, it’s the leaves from the tea estates of these higher altitudes that are particularly sought after for their exceptional quality in taste and colour.

Tea plantations in the central highlands of Sri Lanka

While the scenery was exceptional and the climate pleasant, anyone with half a heart who might head off the beaten tourist path in this district would find much injustice to dampen the mood….

We pass through a small town as we climb up into the mountains

A village rests on a hill above a giant waterfall
in the high watershed of Sri Lanka’s central highlands

Life sucks for the average tea plantation worker

Unlike other Sarvodaya endeavours – where entire villages reassess what’s really important in life and then work together to implement positive change on land under their control – Sarvodaya faces a much greater challenge here, with the people they’re trying to assist being low paid peasant tenants on state owned, industry controlled estates.

Across Sri Lanka women are often discriminated against, but on the tea plantations this tendency is even more pronounced. Tea plucking is assigned to women and girls, only, with the girls starting as young as twelve years old. They, along with their males, are accommodated in barracks of one or two room ‘line houses’ (which I was not allowed to view or photograph) with extremely basic amenities – normally without running water, electricity, sanitation facilities and often even without windows. Six to eleven family members may live together in a single room. Privacy and sexual harassment is thus also a significant problem, resulting in a higher than normal suicide rates amongst the women.

Pluckers are paid by the quantity they harvest, earning about 200 rupees per day (US$1.75) from working 7:30am to 5-5:30pm. In the peak season they will work these hours seven days per week for up to three months, slowing to 3-4 days per week in the off-season. In the dim light or darkness before and after work the women must also cater to the needs of their families – looking for firewood with which to cook their meals, etc. This burden is offset a little by having even younger girls attend to domestic duties during the daylight hours.

Men fare slightly better – they’ll earn about the same amount for working less hours, weeding, logging and planting from 7:30am to 1:30pm, and can earn a little more again from other tasks after that. Men are responsible for collecting not only their own wage, but also that of their wives and daughters….

At the end of their working life workers are paid a small, lump sum pension payment – after which they’re at the mercy of their extended family.

Article continues after photos.

Women queuing at 5pm to register their day’s work at the estate office…

…both young…

…and old…

…before being trucked to a different part of the estate
– to work a little more before the day closes.

Mostly illiterate and unskilled, workers have little hope of escaping to a more equitable or meaningful life. All the estates pay the same rate, so trying to transfer to one of the other (roughly 500) plantations in the country is pointless. The industry retains its labour force, not through incentives or reward, but by paying them so inadequately that they just cannot leave.

As most have little to no land or time available to cultivate much in the way of their own food, they’re fully dependent on this wholly unjust money system.

‘Fair Trade’

The particular estate I visited had the apparent dual advantage of being ‘fair trade’ in addition to Sarvodaya’s involvement. When questioning the women on the benefits brought by the estate’s fair trade status, however, my disgust with many fair trade claims was further cemented. After much contemplation, the women said the fair trade organisation had provided school bags for their children, and a couple of very small buildings for religious services. Wahoo! Convinced they must have done more, I pressed different individuals during the course of my visit, asking in different ways in the hope of prying more information out. I signally failed to discover anything more that ‘fair trade’ had done to improve their lot. The one thing they did confirm was that they were not paid more than workers on other estates.

That should give you that nice warm, fuzzy feeling the next time you pay a premium to pick up fair trade Sri Lankan tea at your local market, hey?

When escorted into the estate’s leaf processing factory I was told I must put my camera away. When querying the reason, I was informed that the last person to take pictures there, a year prior I believe, returned to her homeland, Germany, and the pictures went into a German newspaper report that didn’t make the ‘fair trade’ organisation happy at all…. The result of the article was not an improvement of worker conditions, but a ban on further photographs in the building.

Sarvodaya, the people’s movement, more effective

When asked about Sarvodaya’s involvement, however, they were far more enthusiastic. One middle aged and heavily calloused women clearly stated "Sarvodaya has much more value to us than fair trade".

One of the first tangible benefits Sarvodaya has brought was to provide (with international donors financing it and the estate workers and Sarvodaya volunteers providing the labour), clean drinking water – through a gravity fed system that filters the water and pipes it directly to tanks on top of the line houses. As you might imagine, carrying water great distances in your ‘free’ time, when working such long shifts, would be a major chore. This single low-tech design implementation is, on its own, of immense value to the tenant families.

In addition Sarvodaya has, just like in other Sarvodaya villages, encouraged and helped the women to form committees to address specific needs, and has encouraged the estate managers to open estate management up to input from the same. Of the estates Sarvodaya are involved in, up to fifty percent of the labourers are now members of committees which directly influence estate management. Wage increases don’t enter into the discussion at this point, but other aspects that directly effect their quality of life do – including developing greater respect for women by all.

Sarvodaya is working to improve the estates’ health situations – currently farm accidents and other medical issues can be traumatic and deadly due to delays and lack of medical support and resources – and is also providing micro financing for some to begin small cottage industries. On this particular estate, some of the families that had lived there for generations had tiny portions of garden space, which Sarvodaya was assisting them with to develop a little food security as well.

It seems clear that a grass roots, participatory democracy people’s movement will always be more effective than top down, industry- and self-interest controlled, consumer-pandering financial mechanisms. The self-interest foundation of capitalism ensures funds trickle, or flood, to the people with power, not the people who need it or have earned it.

A peaceful revolution?

When I first arrived at the estate I was welcomed like a king. Warm smiles and enthusiastic hand shaking ensued before I was prominently seated in a small room with more than 15 other women and just a few men – one a rather apprehensive looking fair trade representative. A wooden bowl was produced, a finger dipped into it, and a Tilaka painted onto my forehead. Then a floral necklace, reminiscent of the Hawaiian Lei, but made of plastic, was placed over my head and around my neck. To complete the welcome they all sang a song in unison. I worked hard to project appreciation and not reveal my inner embarrassment for such a show of attention.

Talking with them all, I felt so out of touch with the realities of their life, and yet as a westerner accustomed to some degree of (at least perceived) independence, I felt a deep frustration for the way these people are forced to live. Short of suicide, they truly have little chance to escape their onerous existence.

After speaking a while and hearing their situation and their views, with my frustration deepening, I couldn’t help but broach the topic of ’systemic management change’ and/or land redistribution. Could they envision a more equitable profit-share scenario, where workers co-owned the estate and benefitted from its development?

"No, we can’t see our instigating a revolution", one said, as they all broke into a smile.

"What then, do you see for the future?"

"We put our hopes in our children" another shared, with others nodding in agreement.

They told me that Sarvodaya is helping support the education of their children, giving hope that these will go on to achieve more, become politically and legally active, and potentially overturn the system they were born into. Sarvodaya’s leadership training has seen not a few underprivileged young people go on to become teachers, lawyers and even judges. This, combined with the Sarvodaya philosophy of ‘progress/welfare for all’, has the potential, they believe, to stimulate positive pressure on their situation.

In Part II of this series I shared the meaning of the words ‘Sarvodaya Shramadana’, the name of the people’s movement I’ve been documenting. It is, essentially, "the awakening and uplift/progress/welfare of all". In the context of the modern day feudalism and effective slavery occurring at these tea estates, the words might well also be transliterated into, simply, ‘a peaceful revolution’?

Stay tuned for Part X….

But, not stopping on the negative, Rhamis goes on to show some of the exciting movements within Detroit that these circumstances are giving life to. Out of necessity, people are working to increase their resiliency and quality of life – turning the problem of Detroit into a solution. Rhamis joins the dots between our socio-economic problems and the environmental catastrophes taking place, and begins to look through the lens of permaculture to see how we can turn things around by imitating natural systems to create low- to no-impact societies that don’t operate on the boom-and-bust model that present day Detroit is arguably the most striking example of.

Duration: 82 minutes

Part way through the talk Rhamis presents the following Urban Roots film trailer. I’ll put it below for convenience. To jump back to where the trailer below (higher quality) ends in the video above, click on 31:40 on progress bar above.

Some people think the permaculture flower is a remnant of the hippie’s flower power movement, or that it has something to do with New Age – just another consumerism idea to be sold to the confused and rich people of the middle classes. Oh no, the ‘flower power’ of the permaculture flower has real power. It has the power to reunite humanity with the complex systems of nature, so they can live in symbiosis, enriching each other. Nothing else possesses this power.

The petals’ colours are given by the pattern languages they cover. These adapt to place and culture, giving the flower a local color. The seven petals together support all aspects of life. It is not just a flower of beauty, or with a pleasant smell. No, this flower can provide you with everything you need, for all aspects of life. Nothing else I know can do that.

In the core you find what are most valuable, the basic ethics and the guiding principles. The core is like the heart of the flower; every permaculture design has its origin here. The evolutionary spiral path is the sign of the permaculture flower – it’s visionary, integrated into its genes. It starts with ethics and design principles, and it starts with you at a local level. The path is then moving outward connecting all the fields of the society into integrated patterns and pattern languages, making the world a living whole. And this spiral is eternal, like evolution is.

Even though I’m not a permaculture designer I’ve put some consideration into these guiding principles. Before I learned about permaculture these thoughts were hidden from me, but when I see the world from a permaculture perspective it looks different. Very different. But keep in mind these are just some loose thoughts from me, a deeper understanding are to be found at David Holmgren’s home page.

Observe and Interact

Good design starts with observation and interaction with place and history. Here we see the difference between permaculture projects and other projects – the time and energy spent to observe and understand the patterns of time and place, before implementing any new design. This is why I set up a list of criteria that should be met before you invest your time or money in a project. For example, an aid project:

1. The project is using time and energy in observing the patterns of place, nature, culture, community and history. This is done in cooperation with the native people they are intended to help.
2. The project is paying a lot of respect to the patterns of place, nature, culture, community and history, being very careful not to disturb any of these patterns, and that any new systems of design will enrich and strengthen the existing patterns.
3. The project leader should be skilled / experienced in decoding and implementing patterns.

Design from Patterns to Details

In a pattern language you start with the whole and put in the details as you go, if not the whole cannot evolve.

Every pattern has to be unfolded; a living process is by nature morphogenetic, using generative codes. A flower is made this way and nature works this way to avoid trillions of errors – errors that unavoidably occur if you try to force a design upon nature or a community.

If an embryo were shaped by fabrication, and not generated, the number of mistakes would be unbelievably large.

The human embryo is created by 50 doubling of cells. Starting with a single cell (the fertilized egg), after 50 doublings, the embryo has 250 cells. During this doubling process that occurs 50 times, each cell has the opportunity to adapt itself, and to remove possible mistakes by position, adaption, pushing and pulling. The total number of opportunities for correction, then, in the growing embryo, is (1+2+2²+2³+….2⁵⁰) = 2⁵¹. Reversing the argument, we may express this by saying that the assembly of embryo cells, if not given a chance for adaption and instead made by design and fabrication, would typically have 2⁵¹ mistakes – a truly enormous number, roughly 10¹⁵, or a thousand trillion mistakes. That is what would happen if an embryo were designed and built, not generated. If an embryo were built from a blueprint of a design, not generated by an adaptive process, there would inevitably be one thousand trillion mistakes. Because of its history as a generated structure, there are virtually none. – The Process of Creating Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 187-188

And the fundamental answer is, that there is a fundamental law about the creation of complexity, which is visible and obvious to everyone – yet this law is, to all intents and purposes, ignored in 99% of the daily fabrication process of society. The law states simply this: ALL the well-ordered complex systems we know in the world, all those anyway that we review as highly successful, are GENERATED structures, not fabricated structures.” – The Process of Creating Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 180

Always keep this in mind; a living structure cannot be fabricated, it has to be generated!

Integrate Rather than Segregate

The core of the pattern practice is to integrate rather than segregate. This means to use and value diversity, all in a meaningful relationship with each other. A completely integrated pattern language produces no waste, especially by not wasting human capital, which is the largest waste problem in our western societies. Our so called “modern societies” produce almost nothing but waste, and the more waste, the more “modern” according to most political and economical theory. Even recycling, which for the most part means downcycling, is mainly a waste of time and energy. See also.

A modern city like Brasilia is based on the completely opposite – segregate rather than integrate – which is the core of modernism. And this is a tragedy, because this is the opposite of an integrated life, and to live an integrated life is the meaning of life.

The world’s leading anti modernist, Christopher Alexander, has dedicated his life to creating an integrated world, which means a world that consists of a deep wholeness. Just take a look at pattern 9 in A Pattern Language.

Conflict

The artificial separation of houses and work creates intolerable rifts in people’s inner lives.

Resolution

Use zoning laws, neighborhood planning, tax incentives, and any other means available to scatter workplaces throughout the city. Prohibit large concentrations of work, without family life around them. Prohibit large concentrations of family life, without workplaces around them.

There is nothing I despise more than these monocultures of houses so common today; I hate them even more than lawns. To make the situation even worse are houses ordered in rows, like a plantation of houses, every house separated from one another, while in nature most things are ordered in clusters or guilds. Urban and rural design should have been based on house clusters.

Conflict

People will not feel comfortable in their houses unless a group of houses forms a cluster, with the public land between them jointly owned by all the householders.

Resolution

Arrange houses to form very rough but identifiable clusters of 8 to 12 households around some common land and paths. Arrange the clusters so that anyone can walk through them, without feeling like a trespasser.

Why can’t people understand that monocultures make life monotone?!?

The opposite of this madness is the ecovillage, but because of individualism (which today is identical with consumerism) and sectorialism (most visible in bureaucracy), people find it almost impossible to create something so nice today.

Still, my dream is someday to live in an ecovillage by Lake Mjøsa.

Use Small and Slow Solutions

Using small and slow solutions is maybe the most neglected principle today. There is a lot of talk about renewable energy and green technology, but almost nothing about using small and slow solutions, which could have been the most important solution. I recently learned that the amount of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas consumed every year within the European Union equals 12000 times the annual hydro power production of Norway. Where in the world is the EU going to get 12000 Norway’s worth of renewable energy to replace this? Maybe we have to reintroduce the slave trade, because this abuse of fossil fuels equals roughly 1000 energy slaves for each one of us.

Our large and fast solutions are enormously resource hungry, and not just for energy. For example, the amount of macadam necessary for the EU infrastructure equals 10 – 15 tons for every person every year. With an average life span at ca 75 years this means 750 – 1125 tons per person. Try to crush 1000 tons of granite by using a sledge hammer, and you might get an idea about how dependent we are upon fossil fuels to sustain our lifestyle.

Quite a lot of this is taken from the Norwegian mountains. When they find a proper mountain close to the Sea they produce the macadam this way:

First they drill a vertical hole down to sea level, where they make a cave inside the mountain for the crushing mill. Then they start crushing the mountain from above in a large circle around the hole, into which they pour the bigger stones going to the crushing mill. The macadam is transported from here to a ship – one ship every week. The hollowing of the mountain is placed in such a way that it’s not visible from the sea, so not disturbing the mountain’s profile and the tourists view from a cruise ship.

I came to think that our “modern societies” are like these mountains, just an illusion.

Much of this macadam is mixed with asphalt, and this way the people of Europe drive on the top of the Norwegian mountains every day, not even giving it a thought.

But macadam is also used as a bed for pipelines all over the continent, for transporting water and sewage in huge systems. Here where I live they catch the water from ca 200 meters below the surface of Lake Mjøsa, from where they pump it to people living up to 400 meters above the lake. For some of these remote dwellings there is no pipeline for the sewer, so they pump it into trucks driving it down to the sewage cleaning plants from where the water is finally pumped back to Lake Mjøsa.

You maybe call this a sick pattern, but it’s not a pattern at all, because a pattern is something which is in a meaningful connection with something else.

Part of the solution is pattern 178, a compost toilet. This small and slow solution uses no energy at all, still producing both compost and negawatts. Small and slow solutions produce a lot of negawatts – saving megawatts – the easiest way to “produce” new energy. In some countries 30-40% of the energy consumed by society is invested into the delivery of potable water and the removal of sewage. Pumping fluids is extremely energy intensive.

In addition about half of the 15 million tons of phosphorus exploited each year ends up in the oceans. Much of this flushed down the toilet. The world’s known phosphorus reserves can only supply us for another 30 – 80 years.

Our “modern societies” are almost completely running off large and fast solutions. Small and slow is mostly laughed at, as if they were romantic little dreams with no connection to reality.

Small and slow solutions give people control back over their own lives, and in this way giving them back their dignity. Large and fast solutions are left in the hands of specialised ‘experts’ only, destroying the dignity and responsibility of ordinary people.

I cannot think about anything more packed with small and slow solutions than an earthship. It’s a completely integrated system, ready to meet the collapse of our large and fast solutions – a collapse that is getting closer every day.

The symbol of this principle is a snail, known for its slow speed and small house. More than ever it is time for going to the snail to become wise.

Use Edges and Value the Marginal

Here I’ll just say a little about the last part of this principle – to value the marginal. The word marginal has many meanings. I’ll concentrate on the meaning “not of central importance” for the beauty of the area. This according to pattern 104, site repair:

Conflict

Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.

Resolution

On no account place buildings in the places which are most beautiful. In fact, do the opposite. Consider the site and its buildings as a single living eco-system. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, conformable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.

I hardly think anything has destroyed the beauty of our world more than the violence against this pattern. It’s horrible to see how the rich and privileged people have put their holiday residences and mansions at the most beautiful spots along the Oslo Fjord. And this way they destroy both the beauty of the fjord and the access for ordinary people to these places.

We, the permaculture people, are designated to heal our world. This is why we should pay a special attention to this pattern.

But still I’m just a permaculturist by heart, not by diploma, so please forgive me my limited understanding. I have just started my walk at the evolutionary spiral path of permaculture. How I wish I had been given this path by birth. And please, share the permaculture flower, so that the world can recover. Let us create a new kind of world, a world sustained by real flower power.

In addition to my last two posts (here and here), here are a couple of additional information sources to help make the case for major investment to be made into global earth repair/ecosystem restoration work.

The United Nations Environment Programme recently published a report titled "Dead Planet, Living Planet – Biodiversity and Ecosystem Restoration for Sustainable Development: A Rapid Response Assessment" (15mb PDF). What makes this document so useful and important is that it presents compelling arguments for performing this work that speak to the concerns of business & economics just as much as it does of those concerned about the state of our global ecology and environment. Doing so will prove to be invaluable in helping to attract funding in amounts befitting the vital importance of this work.

Below, I’ve excerpted portions of the report’s summary that are of particular interest:

• Ecosystems, from forests and freshwater to coral reefs and soils, deliver essential services to humankind estimated to be worth over USD 72 trillion a year – comparable to World Gross National Income. Yet in 2010, nearly two-thirds of the globe’s ecosystems are considered degraded as a result of damage, mismanagement and a failure to invest and reinvest in their productivity, health and sustainability.
• Biodiversity and ecosystems deliver crucial services to humankind – from food security to keeping our waters clean, buffering against extreme weather, providing medicines to recreation and adding to the foundation of human culture. Together these services have been estimated to be worth over 21–72 trillion USD every year – comparable to the World Gross National Income of 58 trillion USD in 2008.
• Effective conservation is the cheapest and most optimal option for securing services, costing only from tens to a few hundred USD per hectare.
• Indeed, restoration costs range from hundreds to thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of USD for every hectare restored, or over 10 fold that of effectively managed protected areas. These numbers, however, are dwarfed compared to the long-term estimated costs of loosing these ecosystem services.
• Well planned, appropriate restoration, compared to loss of ecosystem services, may provide benefit/cost ratios of 3–75 in return of investments and an internal rate of return of 7–79%, depending on the ecosystem restored and its economic context, thus providing in many cases some of the most profitable public investments including generation of jobs directly and indirectly related to an improved environment and health. Ecological restoration can further act as an engine of economy and a source of green employment.
• A world wide survey of studies looking at restoration and conservation of ecosystem services shows us that conservation and restoration provides a highly profitable, low-cost investment for maintaining ecosystem services. Increases in biodiversity and ecosystem service measures after restoration are positively related. Restoration actions focused on enhancing biodiversity should support increased provision of ecosystem services, particularly in tropical terrestrial biomes. Conversely, these results
  suggest that ecosystem restoration focused mainly on improving services should also have a primary aim at restoring biodiversity.

The report isn’t completely devoid of contentious points. In providing suggested guidelines for avoiding pitfalls in restoration projects, the native vs. non-native debate rears its ugly head. See suggestion #3 (Note: The report may be making the suggestion that carefully chosen, intended non-native species may be used):

A set of guidelines are recommended to avoid pitfalls in restoration projects. These pitfalls include, among others:

1. Unrealistic goals or changes in restoration targets in the process;
2. Improper and partial restoration which creates monocultures with little ecosystem service capacity compared to reference sites;
3. Unintended transplant of non-native invasive pests or species;
4. Lack of monitoring to ensure that restoration results in rising biodiversity and services in restored ecosystems;
5. Lack of reduction in the pressures that lead to the loss of ecosystems in the first place;
6. Lack of adequate integration of stakeholders and socio-economic issues.

The final portion of the report’s summary makes 11 excellent recommendations for ecosystem restoration work that deserve to be read. Take time to check out the link – it’s well worth it.

by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom

No one is immune to it; in some respects it is the foundation of our lives. Magical thinking is a universal affliction. We see what we want to see, deny what we don’t. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, we burrow back into the darkness of our cherished beliefs. We will do almost anything – cheat, lie, stand for high office, go to war – to shut out challenges to the way we see the world.

I spend much of my time confronting one aspect of denial: the virulent repudiation of environmental constraints by those who admit no challenge to their vision of the world. But it pains me to report that denial and wishful thinking are almost as common on the other side of the argument. I find myself at odds with other greens almost as often as I find myself fighting our common enemies. I’ve had bruising battles over a long series of miracle solutions supported by my friends: liquid biofuels(1), hydrogen cars and planes(2), biochar plantations(3,4), solar electricity in the UK(5), scrappage payments(6), feed-in tariffs(7). But no green delusion is as crazy as the one I am about to explain. The idea itself might not interest you. But the insight it gives into the filtering techniques human beings use is fascinating. So please bear with me while I spell out the latest madness.

That there’s a problem is undeniable. As some of the papers published yesterday by the Royal Society show, farmland is in short supply, water shortages could impose ever tighter constraints on agriculture and there are grave questions about whether or not a growing population can continue to be fed(8). There are a number of plausible solutions. But none of them appeals to some environmentalists as much as the towering lunacy promoted by a parasitologist at Columbia University called Dickson Despommier.

Despommier points out that while horizontal space for growing crops is limited, vertical space remains abundant. So he proposes that crops should be grown in skyscrapers, which he calls vertical farms(9). These, he claims, will feed the growing population so efficiently that ordinary farmland will be allowed to revert to forest. Vertical farms will feed the urban populations that surround them, eliminating the need for long-distance transport.

You can, if you shield your eyes very carefully, see the attraction. But even a brief reading of Despommier’s essays reveals a few trifling problems. He proposes that 30-storey towers should be built to feed local people in places like Manhattan. You wouldn’t see any change from $100m, possibly $200m. The only crop which could cover such costs is high-grade cannabis. But a 30-storey hydroponic skunk tower would be quite hard to conceal.

Without offering any explanation for this amazing claim, Despommier asserts that his system will require “no herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers”(10). Perhaps he has never seen a fungal infestation in a greenhouse. And what does he expect the plants to grow on: water and air alone? He also insists that there will be “no need for fossil-fueled machinery”, which suggests that he intends to farm a 30-storey building without pumps, heating or cooling systems.

His idea, he says, is an antidote to “intensive industrial farming, carried out by an ever decreasing number of highly mechanized farming consortia” but then he calls on Cargill, Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland and IBM to fund it(10). He suggests that “locally grown would become the norm”(11), but fails to explain why such businesses wouldn’t seek the most lucrative markets for their produce, regardless of locality. He expects, in other words, all the usual rules of business, economics, physics, chemistry and biology to be suspended to make way for his idea.

But the real issue is scarcely mentioned in his essays on the subject: light. Last week one of my readers, the film maker John Russell, sent me his calculations for the artificial lighting Despommier’s towers would require. You can read them in full below the references on this article. They show that the light required to grow the 500 grammes of wheat that a loaf of bread contains would cost, at current prices, £9.82. (The current farm gate price for half a kilo of wheat is 6p(12).) That’s just lighting: no inputs, interest, rents, rates, or labour. Somehow this minor consideration – that plants need light to grow and that they aren’t going to get it except on the top storey – has been overlooked by the scheme’s supporters. I won’t bother to explain the environmental impacts.

None of this has dented the popularity of Despommier’s dumb idea. It has featured in the New York Times(13), Time magazine(14), Scientific American(15), and on the BBC(16), CNN(17), Discovery Channel(18) and NBC(19). Three weeks ago the Guardian published a supportive piece, whose author appeared to be unaware that nutrients don’t magically regenerate themselves in an agricultural system(20). Environmentalists love it. Treehugger.com claimed that vertical farming would “help us stop the use of pesticides, herbicides, oil-based fertilizers”(21) and suggested, again unhindered by evidence, that it could produce a net output of energy(22). The Huffington Post said the idea is “so simple, so elegant that you wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself.”(23)

In my grouchier moments I feel that only those who grow some of their own food should write about food production. Horticulture, with its endlessly varied constraints and disappointments, is an excellent corrective to wishful thinking. But this is about much more than ignorance and inexperience. It’s about seeing something you like – local food for example – and allowing that idea to crowd out everything else. This is how we all live.

In a recent essay in New Scientist the psychologist Dorothy Rowe explained that none of us can see reality(24). We have to construct it from our interpretation of what we perceive, tempered by experience. As a result, each of us exists in our own world of meaning. It is constantly at risk of being shattered by inconvenient facts. If we acknowledge them, they can destroy our sense of self. So, to ensure that we won’t be “overwhelmed by the uncertainty inherent in living in a world we can never truly know”, we shut them out by lying to ourselves. Though it challenges my sense of self, I am forced to accept that my allies can lie to themselves as fluently as my opponents can.

References:

1. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/06/worse-than-fossil-fuel/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/11/06/an-agricultural-crime-against-humanity/ http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/02/12/the-last-straw/

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/04/15/the-pleasures-of-the-flesh/

2. George Monbiot, 2006. Heat: How to stop the planet burning. Penguin, London.

3. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/24/woodchips-with-everything/

4. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/27/pyrolising-the-planet/

5. George Monbiot, 2006. Heat: How to stop the planet burning. Penguin, London.

6. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/10/scrap-it/

7. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/03/01/a-great-green-rip-off/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/03/05/treachery-or-common-sense/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/03/12/the-german-disease/

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/03/19/jonathan-porritts-strange-slurs/

8. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/current/

9. Dickson Despommier, no date given. The Vertical Farm Essay. http://www.verticalfarm.com/essay.htm

10. ibid. Listed under Advantages of Vertical Farming.

11. Dickson Despommier, November 2009. Growing Skyscrapers: The Rise of Vertical Farms. Scientific American.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-rise-of-vertical-farms

12. World prices in July were roughly $194/tonne – http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=wheat
That means 9.7 cents per 500g, or 6.2 pence.

13. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/health/15iht-15farm.14494470.html

14. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1865974,00.html

15. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-rise-of-vertical-farms

16. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6752795.stm

17. http://money.cnn.com/2007/09/10/technology/farming_vertical.biz2/index.htm?section=money_topstories

18. http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/daily-planet/april-2009/daily-planet-april-23-2009/#clip164926

19. http://www.nbc.com/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/video/episodes/#vid=1021161

20. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/29/vertical-farms-urban-food

21. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/06/vertical_farmin_1.php

22. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/skyfarming_new.php

23. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacqueline-leo/food-fuel-and-farming-the_b_104192.html

24. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627651.000-liar-liar-why-deception-is-our-way-of-life.html

……………………………………..

John Russell’s calculations:

First to establish how much energy a crop needs to grow from planting out to maturity.

“In the UK when the latitude and cloud cover is taken into account we can expect a crop to be receiving an average of 150W/square metre during daylight hours during the growing season. [Source page 38 of — http://www.withouthotair.com/ * ] In the UK daylight hours are typically 12 hours/day averaged during the summer which would mean, for each square metre, 1.8kWh per day. Let’s assume a typical crop needs 90 days to reach maturity, so sunlight requirement (90 x 1.8) = 162kWh per square metre of crop.

Of course some food crops need less light — mushrooms for instance — but most food crops prefer not to be in the shade. [Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/htbg/module7/setting_up_your_plot1.shtml & http://www.pots2plots.com/Growing%20%20in%20Shade.htm ]

So having established the amount of light crops need, the next question is; what is the yield of a sq metre?

The yield of wheat crops in the UK is on average 7.8 tonnes per hectare. [Source: http://www.defra.gov.uk/evidence/statistics/foodfarm/enviro/observatory/indicators/b/b11_data.htm ] As there are 10,000 square metres in a hectare, this is equivalent to 0.78kg per square metre. ( 207kWh light requirement per kilo).

Here are some other crops and their yields …

Potatoes: 4.4 kg per sq metre. [Source: http://www.ukagriculture.com/crops/potatoes_uk.cfm ] … 36kWh light requirement per kilo.
Sugar beet: 5.6kg per sq metre. [Source: http://www.ukagriculture.com/crops/sugar_beet_farming.cfm ]… 29kWh light requirement per kilo.
Oil seed rape: 0.33kg per sq metre [Source: http://www.ukagriculture.com/crops/oil_seed_rape.cfm ] … 490kWh light requirement per kilo.
Peas: 0.35kg per sq metre [Source: http://www.ukagriculture.com/crops/peas_uk.cfm ] …462kWh light requirement per kilo.
Beans: 0.35kg per sq metre [Source: http://www.ukagriculture.com/crops/field_beans_uk.cfm ] …462kWh light requirement per kilo.
Oats: 0.55kg per sq metre [Source: http://www.ukagriculture.com/crops/oats_uk.cfm ] …294kWh light requirement per kilo.

A loaf of bread contains 500gm of wheat (current approx cost at the farm gate: 10p) . Each square metre of land produces approx 1.5 loaves of bread and has required 162 kWh of sunlight to grow. This means each loaf of bread embodies 108 kWh of energy.

So that’s conventional growing now growing the same amount under artificial light…

To grow these crops indoors, the same amount of energy –162/kWh per square metre — will be required in the form of electricity.*

However ‘grow bulbs’ are not 100% efficient; I kW of light output at the bulb requires 1.3 units of electricity at the socket. This means all figures for power need to be lifted by 1.3. [Source: http://urbangardenmagazine.com/2010/02/plasma-grow-lights-the-promises-of-full-spectrum-plant-lighting/ ]

Assuming the commercial price of electricity is 7p/unit the costs for a crop such as peas — for light alone will be 462units x £0.07 x 1.3 = £0.42 per kilo. For a single loaf of bread the electricity required just for the light will cost £9.82 (108 units x 1.3 x £0.07). [Source of electricity price http://www.businessenergyprices.com/ ].

*However it seems that the energy issue might be reduced by the introduction of a new generation of LED grow lights which reduce the energy required by just providing the plants with the part of the radiation spectrum that they require for growth. [ http://www.ledgrowlight.co.uk/?page=better ] Currently they are very expensive [ http://www.growlightsled.co.uk/hydroponic-lamp-225-led-grow-light-panel-board-bulb-kit-p-36.html ] but in the long term they might provide significant savings in power consumption. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode ].”

The UK Gov’t backtracks on cast iron commitments to environmental performance standards to make space for more dirty coal.

I can’t help thinking it’s a sweetener to bring the big energy companies on board for the stalled nuclear programme. Investors won’t commit unless the taxpayer guarantees their profits and underwrites the decommissioning costs.

Public debt for private profit, without so much as a mention of consumer restraint – all sounds depressingly familiar.

Permaculture is a design science that applies design to the way humanity needs to supply itself with its requirement to live sustainably and in a way that actually enhances the environment. So, the principles of permaculture turn the footprint of humanity into the most beneficial footprint on earth rather than the most damaging footprint. And that’s how nature works.

Permaculture’s principles come from nature itself. So the principles of natural systems and ecosystems are the teachers of the principles of permaculture and in nature. There’s a continuous sort of balance in life, and all our traditional and symbols of heritage, symbolise balance.

So, we can be very certain that as presently damaging as we are, we can be equally beneficial. So the damaging part is that we are in the consequence of trying to create a civilised world, which we appear to be actually destroying. In other words, civilisation appears to be the most damaging thing, the most resource depleting and the most pollutant, consequential activity. True civilisation would be something that created abundance and a fair, equal, safe and positive future. So permaculture is very much based in positivism and oriented around solutions. It deals very much with the connectivity between all the disciplines that we require to understand so that we can create that potentially very important world that we know is possible.

Permaculture creates positive economies, positive social systems and very well designed human habitats of not just architecture but villages and towns and human settlements. As well as the way we provide our food and our clean water and endlessly diversifying and enriching environment.

Disciplines of Permaculture

Permaculture is a system that is co-operative — the co-operation of elements. We harmonise with natural systems, and we use those as our guide to actually laying down the framework for how we should assemble the relevant knowledge of humanity in a useful, useable form. It’s like creating a wardrobe where all the knowledge that’s required for a sustainable world can be assembled in a very easily used way. And that deals with very much with co-operative principles and beneficial connections. So permaculture is very much about connecting disciplines together, it’s a system that is based in connectivity really. It’s more about the connections, than it is the disciplines themselves of knowledge.

I’m very interested in how meaningful action changes your sense of time. Time quality is something that is of immeasurable value and most of us today have a lack of available time, our time is poor in quality and it lacks density. Our time is diluted and very low in quality, whereas I’d rather experience a life of very high-density time and very high quality. And I think most people would, they just need to come to terms with that and take a bit of a brave action to make a commitment. And I think that most people would rather have a positive future to look forward to and for the children of future generations.

If people are creating more co-operative and tolerant communities, they are probably doing the right thing. If resources keep gathering around you, you’re probably doing the right thing. If a lot of those resources are people who are also involved in a good intention of creating a sustainable world, you’re probably doing the right thing. If people are more content with less in the form of conventional financial systems and are more interested in clean air, clean water, clean food, sensible houses, warmth and friendship and community, they’re probably doing the right thing.

Most of these communities are themed around sustainability and therefore, they have to have that as their intention. Some communities glue together with other systems like beliefs, belief systems, or religions of particular practises but really, I think all the good ones are coming together around the intention for a sustainable future. Permaculture can do that for you in the form of a local community group.

We haven’t really gotten the beautiful tapestry of community that we once had. In fact, we don’t even have the fabric that the tapestry was once woven onto. You can’t weave a tapestry until you have the fabric and you need to have a reweaving of the fabric of community and that means co-operation, tolerance and a shared intention that you would like to see some sort of sustainable future.

Local Poly-cultural Action

Local poly-cultural action is an identification of the resources of your bio-region and the needs to create the livings of primary production, the processing of primary production, services and the arts. Those are the four main livings that we engage in.

How and what we produce from the land identifies our bio-region; and that’s never been more potentially diverse than it is now. Our gardens and our landscapes are potentially eight hundred times more diverse than they were in the Middle Ages.

Those primary productive produced elements are processed and evaluated many times over. With one product alone, it can be processed more than once and then how people service each other’s needs in the local community and then of course we always need the arts because the arts are a great way of transferring the sciences. Science and art is really one thing. Art is the science of survival and science is the art of survival and before we got sort of confused with the present academic system that was how we transferred knowledge in a very anchoring way.

Ancient tribal cultures express themselves in all the arts through storytelling, song, poetry, paintings, artwork, dance, or theatre. It’s the transfer of knowledge through anchoring information with enjoyable emotions. It really is a link of knowledge and we’ve all experienced it. For example, most of our nursery rhymes have hidden messages.

A lot of it is really just the methodology, not the actual messages. Permaculture has changed and enriched the lives of those around the world because people have been incredibly stimulated and excited by permaculture. People say it’s infectious, and the most exciting thing they have ever engaged in. You take a good permaculture design certificate course and you end up with a heavily infected dose of permaculture and you leave so infected that you infect other people, and so it ripples out.

Through permaculture, people recognise that life has a meaning and they can see the rational; they can legitimise and rationalise why it makes absolute common sense. Then, fear starts to dissipate and drop away and as you make more and more commitments you have less and less fear of all the things you should be doing and what you could be doing because you realise what it is that you can do.

Then, people start to function more efficiently because they realise what it is they can do.

The big difference between permaculture and a lot of the other systems that elaborate principles continuously is that permaculture specialises in directives to act. So it converts principles into directives to act.

Permaculture actually examines the ecology and the environment, emulates those principles and then says this is the way you interact with it and you improve the environment and nature. It is active and interactive; it’s an evolution in human thinking.

People all over the world have emulated and interacted with each other through permaculture. At the moment, we’re having, a big fundraiser for Chile because we have a Permaculture Research Institute in Chile where they have just had the earthquake. In fact, just a few days before the earthquake I was teaching with Skype, and just a few days later the earthquake hit them. They went into action to help the government and the people of Chile to recover and develop and rebuild in a more sustainable way. There’s also big action coming in from Turkey, where our PRI Turkey is really taking off. I’m getting more and more Turkish students coming over and then going back to train their own people. We’re also working in Haiti and Canada. So they’re using permaculture in a sustainable action.

Permaculture is very much an endemic Australian system and it’s probably our most beneficial export because it’s potentially going to cushion the industrial juggernaut that seems as if it’s almost impossible to actually stop, but at least we can cushion the impact of an eminent crash.

The Eminent Crash

You may be wondering what the eminent crash is. Well it’s quite obvious that we are actually running out of resources en masse, but we are particularly running out of the liquid fuels and the fossil fuels. There’s also an obvious food shortage because the world’s not produced any more food since 2000. The amount of food produced globally, increased yearly up until the year 2000 and then it hit a peak. Population didn’t slow down, so there’s less food all the time for more people and that’s why you are getting more and more interest everywhere in the world for community gardens and local food security. That’s happening everywhere in Australia and around the first and third world.

People are realising they are going to have to bring food production back into population, and into urban and perimeter urban situations. We have a serious water crisis because there is very little pure water left and most water is polluted. We’ve also got a climate that’s going into crisis not just warming, but it’s actually spiking in all directions. It’s losing its moderating elements because there’s more and more of the environment being taken down. More and more forests are coming down, which affects our ecosystem, and ecosystems are full of life and life is full of energy. This is the stored energy of the sun. Forests are the most efficient absorbers of the sun’s energy. If you don’t have the absorbing mechanism it goes into the climate and we get an incredibly erratic climate. All of this is affecting our soil erosion that in turn affects our food supply.

There is also a fossil fuel crisis, which is creating a financial crisis. We know that if the price of oil spikes to a certain level, the global economy collapses. These are all huge clusters of crisis. So, sooner or later an accumulation of crises like these has to cause a dramatic effect. It would be better if we could design our way out of this rather than try and struggle out of some kind of horrible collapse of civilisation.

Permaculture and Farmers

Farmers are in absolute strife at the moment and it’s getting worse. There are less and less people on the land all the time and there are more and more people in factories. The average young person sits in front of a screen for forty to sixty hours a week. Farmers also do this and they don’t look at the soil anymore or the sky so much and gauge the life in their systems. Rather, they read weather systems on a computer; they read the instructions on a machine and the instructions on the packets of chemicals and genetically engineered seed.

Most of their knowledge is coming from outside rather than from inside, so that their farms become eco-systemic systems, rather than monocultural, factory, industrial systems. As Rudolph Steiner said in the nineteen twenties in the famous lectures, “The farm needs to be an eco-system to itself.” Until your farm is actually creating soil, as well as surplus produce, it will never be sustainable. It’s a very simple gauge. You cannot be destroying the soil and producing surplus produce for the economy for very long. Farmers need to keep a keen eye on their quality and quantity of soil, and to do that you have to have an eco-systemic system.

Some of the modern systems of soil biology stimulus are a good silver bullet to get you back on track. We use those a lot. They’ve been very popular. And then there are things like the oxygenated compost tea systems, where we’re breeding soil organisms en masse and with very rapid, highly oxygenated liquids so that we can bring the soil life back in a very short amount of time. But they are not designed by themselves; you have to then have a good design to follow it up. So, we can give you a fast recovery system and then you need to be able to design an ecology-supported farm.

Some farmers are choosing to change and some are just simply leaving the farm. The last Landcare Conference I spoke for was attended by only five percent of farmers. This was after seventy four percent of farmers said they would like to know more on how to sustainably manage land.

The Landcare conference organizers are outside contractors, and not connected directly to land. However, I am connected to the land and I do live streaming where you can see me. This is how my students talk to me around the world now. They actually take the laptop out into the garden and say, “Is this cover crop thick enough? What do you think of the design of this solar system? What do you think this? Do you think this compost toilet system is going to work? They actually show it to me live stream or they put it up on YouTube.

A lot of our systems have been very successful where people are in great need, in aid areas but also in the first world. So, the Landcare conference organizers found us and said, “Well, you seem to be getting a result, would you be prepared to talk to the Landcare conference and explain how you’re coming up with successful systems?”

Many people should be asking the question: What area of land would we need to supply the world with the same nutrition that it presently requires, using permaculture principles?

Realise that I didn’t say food, instead I said nutrition. There is a big difference between food and nutrition because our present food lacks nutritional density. For example, our wheat is one- twelfth the nutrition of the original wheat but sixteen times more productive over the area. We eat enormous amounts of food for very small amounts of nutrition, which kind of wears our bodies out.

So, to answer that question … it’s about two to three percent of the present area that we use with industrial agriculture — two percent in equivalent area. So in other words, urban and perimeter urban agriculture with some rangeland and community forestry, would supply all of our needs. Most of the agricultural land could just go back to wilderness. Agriculture in its present form would probably be illegal — any land practice that degrades the environment and causes soil erosion would be illegal.

The only things that create soil en masse are eco-system processes. You can create a lot of soil in a concentrated area with lots of organic matter, mulches and compost — on the waste products of humanity — but you can’t do it over a large area. So all the large area farms that aren’t producing soil will have to become illegal. Most people wouldn’t have a clue about that. They wouldn’t even realize that’s the case. They’d probably find that a very contentious statement. But I am afraid it’s true.

What Can You Do Now?

The message of permaculture is also very important for children to hear. Children really look forward to a positive message. They get told too much bad news. Older people as well take on the message very easily because they look back over their life and they say, “We could have done this; this could have been worthwhile.” It’s the middle-aged people that are the really hard ones to get this message to because they just haven’t got time to listen.

So, since the children are the ones that we can work with the most readily and easily, we must work with the schools to get the message out through books. If you look on our website and the books for sale, one of the great books is called “Outdoor classrooms”. The author, Janet Millington, is one of my students and a permaculture teacher. Students of mine have become teachers who have created students, who’ve become teachers, who’ve created students, who’ve become teachers and so on. We’ve got a self-breeding system, where we breed our own teachers. On the Sunshine Coast, on one of the permaculture teacher’s one-day courses, they had over eighty teachers from eighty different schools turn up.

Teachers actually find that when you teach kids this and you get a bit of a system going outside, it can become a land-based system. You can find that the kids that are more connected to the soil, or the ones that you thought had Attention Deficiency Disorder actually didn’t have it. They just needed to be grounded with a few natural processes, and eat a bit of raw food that’s nice and healthy and enzyme rich. All of the lessons of the classroom are outside as well as inside and those kids’ behaviour moderates quite dramatically. Teachers rather like that; it makes their job easier.

There have been reports written into the education department about this and I can see a future where permaculture will be in all schools and almost in all lessons. There aren’t any lessons taught in schools that couldn’t include permaculture as part of the lesson, in every subject.

It would be useful for anybody to take an ‘Introduction to Permaculture’ course or if they are really serious, or take a permaculture design certificate course so they can just start looking at the basic ethics. All traditional cultures base themselves in ethics and permaculture is a movement that begins with an ethic. The ethics are quite simple and they are synthesized down to three but they come from about fourteen to eighteen traditional ethics that have been used around the world. They are: Care for the earth and all it’s living and non-living systems, care of people and supplying the needs of people in a sustainable way and a fair share and return of surplus to earth-care and people-care.

You can see that ethics govern the way we behave and the way we design systems. They give you a direction to act. So, get a bit of information, start to contact local groups and local people, share knowledge with them, and see what you can do to lessen your footprint.

Some time ago the National Geographic did a piece on the connection between the introduction of caffeinated drinks into Europe and the Industrial Revolution.

It’s hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks—replacing the ubiquitous beer—facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee—or Diet Coke or Red Bull—to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn’t exist. – National Geographic

If this is so, then, of course, my incessantly wandering mind must put two and two together. If caffeine was an essential ingredient to bring about the Industrial Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution brought about widespread environmental destruction and climate change, then… that’s it… caffeine is bringing us to the brink of disaster!

Electricity, combined with caffeine, keeps us up late at night – when in pre-industrial times it would have been lights out hours ago. We’re no longer ‘burning the candle at both ends’, but rather the coal-fired power station that lights our homes and powers our televisions through the sunless hours.

And the next day – how does the day begin for most of us? Out of our beds we emerge like the walking dead from a B-grade zombie movie, until we reach for our kick-start-in-a-cup, and begin the cycle again.

Caffeine not only fueled the Industrial Revolution, but the Industrial Revolution and caffeine together saw the demise of the siesta – the mid-afternoon power-nap that was common in many parts of the world, including northern Europe.

And here’s another misunderstanding about siestas. It’s not really a Mediterranean invention – it’s just that those southern European countries have had the good sense to preserve the tradition.

Before the industrial revolution and fixed working hours, it would have been perfectly normal in northern Europe for people to take an afternoon sleep…. – BBC

We’ve written about factory farming several times on this site, and how our industry attempts at efficiency are back-firing in disease. Our industrial mindset takes a biological creature, like a chicken, and puts it into an industrial setting – trying to… er… squeeze out the maximum ‘widgets per chicken-hour’ (in this case, eggs) as possible. We treat the animal like a machine, and when it doesn’t operate as we want, we pump it with drugs until it does. It’s unnatural, and it’s unhealthy.

In a similar way, it’s interesting how we, also a biological creature, are applying this same template to ourselves – patterning ourselves after the machines we’ve created. Our economy is about widgets per man-hour, mathematics, and supposed efficiency. We’re bending our body’s biological clock to fit a schedule dictated by a mechanical clock on the wall, and we’re the only creatures on the planet to do so. Recent studies are proving that our bodies know best.

To reverse environmental degradation, won’t we need to slow down?

While you guys are rolling this around in your mind and thinking how to comment on this, I’m going to go and have forty winks, and come back at peak efficiency.

Zzzz……..